Ten Things You Didn't Know About The Milky Way

1. The Milky Way is beautiful and vast. So vast, in fact, that to get from one end to the other, you'd have to travel for 100,000 years at the speed of light. That means your spaceship would have to be able to fly 186,000 miles per second for one tenth of a million years.

2. The Milky Way is one of the oldest galaxies in the known universe. It came into existence a mere 1.7 billion years after the Big bang. This makes it about 12 billion years old - 7.5 billion years older than our little solar system!

3. The center of the Milky Way galaxy contains a super massive black hole. This black hole is so big and exerts so much gravity on matter surrounding it that the entire nearby area is aglow with super-dense star regions and gasses.

4. The Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of stars just like the sun.

5. One of the biggest and brightest stars in our night sky - Canis Majoris - is so massive, a beam of light would take no less than 8 hours to travel around its equator. By comparison, light could circle planet Earth seven times per second.

6. The Milky Way rotates at 168 miles per second. That's hundreds of times faster than the speed of sound.

7. The Milky Way's days are numbered. Our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, is even now racing toward the Milky Way at incredible speeds and will eventually absorb it.

8. If our solar system were any closer to the center of the galaxy, we would not exist. Temperatures and gravity would be far too high for life to evolve on Earth.

9. It takes the sun approximately 225-230 million years to orbit the center of the Milky Way.

10. On a clear night, we can usually see about 3000 stars in the sky. That's comparable to seeing only 3000 grains of sand on the entire Earth - a small handful.